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Five years of stowaways – Part 1

I promise this might perhaps be the last time we do anything to quite this degree, but it’s not often that you get to celebrate the fifth birthday of a blog! The actual birthday is tomorrow, but I think it’s alright to have a bit of self-indulgence now and then.

Honestly it’s really only because of the reviews (and to a lesser extent also the oldies) that this blog exists. Nearly a decade ago, I bought a new computer, and started ripping all my music onto it, and then I realised that I owned loads of things that I’d never actually listened to, or hadn’t heard for years. So, in no particular order, starting in late 2008, I worked through my entire music collection, listening to every song once.

It took two years, finally ending with a lot of crap at the end of 2010, and then I spent the next year allowing myself to listen to the good stuff a second, and occasionally even third time.

The end result of which was that by the start of 2012, I had completely lost touch – I had gone from buying several new CDs every week five years earlier, to pretty much buying nothing.

So, in order to revitalise my music listening, I started this blog, and forced myself to write reviews of the good stuff. The only rule: I had to listen to the whole thing, properly, and in full, while I wrote the review.

The style of the reviews has changed a bit over time, but the very first one that I wrote, just a touch under five years ago, was this one, for Jean-Michel Jarre‘s Essentials & Rarities collection. So let’s listen to something from that: